0222: Midweek Debrief — Steel, Cloth & Waging the Hidden War

Steel, Cloth & Waging the Hidden War

I saw a read a missive on Substack recently by Matthew Herman Hudson that critiqued the claim that Christianity needs “less passive monks and more active knights.”

To think the monk’s labor is passive, a withdrawal from the struggle that defines this world, is to see with dim sight and hear with a stopped ear. Such a view shrinks the spiritual into a shallow mirror of the material. For even at the surface—the realm of flesh, stone, and letters—monks have been the lifeblood of the church since the days of Constantine. Their hands copied the scriptures, built the churches, tilled the land, and served the sick. Their words taught reformers, kings, and common folk. They crafted counterweights to pride and sloth, not in lofty disdain but in painful and deliberate denial of the very excess that tempts every human soul.

And beyond this visible realm, their prayers, chants, and unbroken vigils batter the gates of heaven. Who among us, walking through modern light and noise, even fathoms what such prayers hold back or call forth? To imagine monastic work as lesser, as idle musings beside the knight’s charge into battle, is to misunderstand both knight and monk. Both are bound to a fight, but one’s battleground may be inward and the other outward. The monk guards the foundations of the world as the knight wields his sword for its survival.

This misunderstanding, I suspect, comes from an itch born of modernity. The world, skeptical and blunt, distrusts the unseen. Machines hum; steel cuts; the airwaves tell stories of heroes whose weapons clatter in the din of war. The subtle weapons, the fasting, the kneeling, the holy words whispered in silence, appear useless. The hero of the world must spill blood to prove his worth.

But have we grown so blind to old truths? The Scriptures speak plainly of the contest in heaven, of the war not against flesh and bone but against rulers, powers, and dominions unseen. Christ Himself withdrew to deserts, mountain tops, and gardens, not to shirk His call but to strengthen His heart for the final sacrifice. Did He not fast for forty days, battered by Satan’s temptations, standing firm as the Adam who would not fall? And what of Paul, whose words on the “full armor of God” still rattle through the Christian soul? Truth girds the waist, righteousness shields the heart, and the sword, sharper than any iron blade, is the Word that cuts clean through falsehood.

The fight we call “spiritual” is as bitter and unrelenting as the clash of armies, and if anything, its weapons bite deeper. Knights wield steel to cut down men; monks take up the cross to mortify the self. Do not mistake mortification for weakness—it takes far greater strength to defeat oneself than to kill a foe. And here, within this daily death, lies the heart of the monk’s work. For in dying to pride, lust, and every grasping passion, the monk undermines the kingdom of hell.

Even the ancients knew the gravity of this unseen fight. Long before Christ spoke in Judea, pagans grasped after heavenly hierarchies. The Norse sagas spoke of Asgard and Jotunheim, a layered cosmos bound by struggle. The Greeks warred their gods in stars and clouds; the Hebrews placed thrones, dominions, and seraphim at the peak of creation. And when the Son of Man walked the earth, He did not abolish such truths but fulfilled and revealed them. In His name, Gabriel still delivers messages to the lowly, and Michael still hews down the prince of Persia.

This cosmos—full and flaming with meaning—is as far from our machine-built wastelands as heaven is from hell. The rise of secular power has not silenced the fight but drowned it in noise. Modern warfare no longer follows battle cries but clicks and transactions. Souls are not struck down in combat; they erode under streams of temptation, thin and ceaseless. Bread is discarded; circuses now shine on screens. The world whispers the lie that this life’s struggles—our afflictions, temptations, and triumphs—are without weight, part of a meaningless drift.

But the church, bound to her Bridegroom, stands against this drift. Her steeples, which once towered above every town, do not symbolize pride. They mark the upward pull of belief, the meeting point of earthly toil and heaven’s calling. Every sacrament is an act of defiance—a claim that water holds rebirth, bread and wine turn flesh and blood, and words have power when spoken by authority. Each stained window, chalice, and vestment serves as a battlefield where meaning is reclaimed from chaos.

Knights, monks, saints—each took their stand in different ways. In times of barbarian invasion, it was the knight’s steel and flesh that shielded Christendom. In ages of spiritual decay, it was the monk’s robe and ink that sustained the heart of the faith. Today’s war may appear less bloody, but it is no less brutal. Our enemies are not outside the gates—they are in the walls, in the language, in the symbols twisted from their God-given roots. Against this flood, the church must hold her ground.

Men look to their forefathers in this war because meaning requires anchors. Tradition gives us strength not out of nostalgia but because it is forged in the fires of centuries. The Mass does not dull the heart—it sharpens it against the world’s cheap imitations of beauty. Ritual and liturgy, misunderstood as empty repetition, are in truth ancient weapons. The words of the Creed hold more power than the clamor of politics; the reading of the Scriptures breaks chains unseen. To kneel, to stand, to lift hands in the prayers of old, is to rehearse the movements of warriors in God’s cause.

To stand at this crossroads of belief and conflict is to recognize what is demanded of both body and spirit. We wear this armor not to triumph by our strength but by God’s mercy. Ritual becomes not an adornment, but the scaffolding holding us firm against forces that grind bones to dust.

And where does that leave the modern monk, the warrior in a world awash in screens and sirens? It leaves him with the same call as those before: to fight, though his battlefields are hidden and his victories unseen. His prayers build unseen citadels; his abstinence wounds the empire of the flesh. And for the knight whose heart burns with zeal to act—he, too, must be guided by the monk’s hand.

For God, in His wisdom, never set monk against knight or tradition against zeal. He wove them together as differing weapons in His vast arsenal. The knight, armed with sword and shield, must learn the humility to lay them down when called to prayer. And the monk, hands clasped in vigil, must trust that his brothers at the gates wield their weapons not for glory but for God.

Whether in chainmail or a rough robe, on the battlefield or in the cloister, every soldier in this kingdom wages the same war. For as long as there is a heaven and an earth, a Christ and a church, there will be a fight to preserve their bond against those who seek to sever it.